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VR developer Survios is one of the leading studios for virtual reality games. Alongside games like the recent Alien: Rogue Incursion for PC, PSVR and Quest 3, the studio is known for one of the most intensive VR games ever made—Creed: Rise to Glory.
Speaking on the latest episode of the VideoGamer Podcast, Survios lead engineer Eugene Elkin revealed that testing VR games is still a big sticking point for developers. Alongside the motion sickness related to unstable performance and unfinished mechanics, the studio also has a “monitor graveyard” of devices destroyed by stray punches.
Alien and Creed VR devs’ monitor graveyard
In the podcast, available now, Elkin revealed that Survios has kept a running tally of every monitor destroyed during development of its VR games since Creed: Rise to Glory. During development of the boxing game, so many monitors were destroyed that the team dedicated a space to the remains of their fallen screens.
“When we were making Creed, we had a running count of how many people got punched in the face,” Elkin told VideoGamer. “It’s been so many. We’ve had monitors… we have like a graveyard of monitors that people just punched. I cracked my monitor three times while I was working on it.”
After release, the team at Survios even kept the tally going, adding to it whenever they saw a video online of a player whacking someone in the face. While the destruction of monitors and the rearranging of faces is one challenge of VR development the team hasn’t conquered, the other is just how hard it is to actually test VR games.
“One [QA] guy, I think he had to go on work comp because he threw out his shoulder.”
SURVIOS LEAD ENGINEER EUGENE ELKIN ON TESTING CREED VR
The team explained that every game has a unique challenge during the testing period, although every game suffers from the same motion sickness issues until movement, performance and other quirks are ironed out. For Creed specifically, the QA team suffered from muscle pains after spending the entire day fighting in virtual rings.
“When we were making Creed, we were making CREO, that QA team had to throw punches every day for like eight hours,” Elkin said. “One guy, I think he had to go on work comp because he threw out his shoulder.”
Alien: Rogue Incursion senior game designer Alissa Smith explained that developers get used to the low framerate of in-development VR games quite quickly.
“Oh, it sucks at first, not going to lie, but the more you’re in it and the more you kind of, you learn how to move… how to move yourself through the world in a way that’s not nauseating [it gets easier],” she explained. “Sometimes it still gets you when you’re in there for too long, but it’s about taking the proper breaks and learning what your body can handle and kind of building up your tolerance to the sort of sickness.”
Nevertheless, testing a VR game is an entirely different beast to testing a flat-screen game. The more intense a game is, the more likely a developer is physically hurt themselves.
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